The Future is Invasive
The fallacy is that the left only acts violently when someone like Donald Trump is president, masking the inherent violence in their nature. I’ve seen the same vitriol, the same talking points when Reagan and George W. Bush were presidents. I watched the same exact actions taken by Clinton, Obama and Biden go unnoticed, even encouraged by the left.
I’ve accepted all of that and simply dismiss their charges and outrage with a shrug of the shoulders. It would be the same anytime they didn’t get what they wanted when they wanted it. They’re children, violent, unreasonable, self-hating children.
Hating themselves allows them to hate everyone else like them: white, middleclass, educated, perhaps Christian. Knowing oneself reveals one’s weaknesses and that’s what they attack, the inherent guilt of being human and living in an advanced society knowing that there are many other societies that are much less forgiving.
The answer to this disparity for the left, is to bring their own society down to the level of their less-advantaged brethren. This is the eternal cycle that we’re locked into, the strong men make successful societies, which breeds weak men, which breeds wrecked societies, which breeds strong men.
The answer for the right is to spread the values and principles that led to the successful society.
The left prefers to punch holes in their own boat, because others have leaky boats. The right attempts to teach others a better method of boatbuilding.
While this tug-of-war is going on, the saboteurs gaining political strength through attrition and the importation of international saboteurs of the American way, there is a much more prescient danger operating in the background of this struggle.
The information war is not so much a left vs right struggle as it is a theft of personal, private information. While it might exist in left vs right terms, the achievement is a mutually assured destruction of personal, private information. In the pursuit of left vs right goals the agreement to sacrifice one’s own privacy to deny privacy of one’s opponent is rampant.
There’s also a neutral industrial and commercial benefit that drives the technology. Phones are not just phones, they’re personal spy devices. Televisions not only allow one to watch programs, they also watch the watchers, track their favorites, build methods of targeting them for advertising. Computers do the same only with a much more sophisticated and invasive method. The whole system is designed to spy on you, record you, track and perhaps even determine what you do.
Now, automobiles are not just cars and trucks, they do it all: they watch not only where you drive, but how you drive. They will soon be able to determine whether you’re in any shape to drive at all. Even in a desperate state, the vehicle might interpret that desperation as rage and refuse to shift out of park. Have you driven for too many hours, or were you too tired when you started to drive? It will decide and just pull over and stop. Insurance companies love this idea and are willing to subscribe to automobile industry data-sharing policies, but that’s just the start.
The idea, ultimately, is to get you out of your personally-owned vehicle and join the group in mass transit. Some auto manufacturers are doing this through basically a subscription to the vehicle rather than a purchase of it. Sort of like a lease without the option to own.
Just because this is Orwellian and typically driven by the left, there’s no reason to believe those on the right are not overjoyed by the thought of it, because politics know no master but itself.
The United States has always been the enemy of political expedience, because it suggested the idea of individual autonomy. I mean, obey the laws of decency and civility and one might do anything that came into their head to do with whatever they had, built or bought. That’s an idea that in the world of technological surveillance cannot be tolerated much longer.
We see this in the fact that the nation has drifted far from that simple concept that has driven the greatest advancements in human history. Wherever it’s tried the concept of human freedom has unleashed economic might and military strength. To whatever degree that freedom is hindered, it results in deprivation and destruction. The US is treading that line and is somewhere on that downward slope.
If any of our human rights mean anything, it must start to matter here, now. A human right means the right to live and breathe freely without the intrusion of government or even corporations. There has to be a way to opt out of being spied on. So far, accepting the espionage goes along with the acceptance, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m saying that in order to raise any sort of defense against AI intrusion, it has to start at a more fundamental level, that of data privacy. That if phones and cars and televisions do not provide a means and method of opting out, they will not be able to secure an FCC license, or a DOT registration.
It has to go beyond left or right and be understood as a human rights violation to record, store or provide private information obtained by use of the technology. At one time slavery was a given and supported by law. We don’t have to accept it.